A week of Hurricane Helene, a rent strike in Kansas and the NYPD shooting people over train fares

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live in Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My newsletter has evolved into this beautiful news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

Today I’m sharing my feelings about a rent strike in Kansas, Hurricane Helene and the NYPD shooting people over $2.90.

Onto the news… 

News that made feel like we need a rent strike forever

On October 1st, the Kansas City Tenants Union started a rent strike against the owners of the Quality Hill Towers and Independent Towers. The tenants from the two buildings went on strike to protest unlivable living conditions. Imagine having the audacity to name your building Quality Hill Towers when walls are caving in and it’s a utopia for roaches. That is the audacity of a landlord. Landlords already commit the sin of stealing people’s labour for a living so making people live under a caving roof is not that much of a moral stretch. 

I’m simply overjoyed that the tenants of these two buildings came together to hold their rent until the landlords make the demanded repairs. Honestly, I’d be even happier if the tenants never paid the landlords ever again, but we live in a dystopia so I’ll take whatever tiny good news I can get. It’s like when you are really hungry and all you have in the fridge are vegan hotdogs and a tortilla. You wrap the hotdog in a tortilla and call it a pig in a sheet. Yes, it would be better to have a well-balanced meal, but you take what you can get. 

The tenants of Quality Hill and Independent Towers are also calling for a 3% national rent cap for buildings backed by the Federal government. I love the solidarity so much that I almost forgot to be angry at the fact that the government is backing slumlords’ loans. Almost! 

Yes, it is absolutely wonderful that these tenants are using their collective power to fight for tenants nationwide. However, I can’t help but scream at the top of my lungs: Why is the government giving loans to corporations to buy housing when it could just let tenants have the housing? I know the short answer is that the government and corporations are evil besties who sit down at brunch together to come up with new ideas on how to torture us.  

However, why do we let them torture us? 

Why don’t we all go on a rent strike? The price of housing is increasing to the point that a family of four needs $318K a year to be comfortable in New York City. If you just threw up after reading that, imagine how I feel. The government is trying to gentrify my neighbourhood. One of the only affordable places left to live in Brooklyn. Everyone is so nervous around here that we don’t tell anyone about our neighbourhood because we are too scared they’ll move here and we’ll be forced to move out. 

Instead of treating our neighbourhood like it’s some sort of secret lair where you can get lunch for $5 while the person behind the register yells at you because you don’t know whether you want chilli or tamarind sauce, we could all stop paying rent. I know it sounds like I’ve eaten way too many edibles, but if the tenants of these two towers can collectively come together and demand better housing, why can’t we all come together and say paying for housing is a scam and we all reject it?

News that made me say stop listening to your oppressors… again

Why were we learning how to diagram sentences instead of learning how to build rafts? Why were we reading books from dead white men instead of learning how to grow our own food? I’ll tell you why, it’s because it wasn’t just Lauryn Hill that was miseducated, we were all miseducated. If you get that Lauryn reference, then I’m sorry your mother used to interrupt your internet browsing by calling to check on you to make sure you got home okay from school. Mom, I’m not okay. I was just winning my Tetris game when you ruined everything.

I will always remember that story of those Indigenous kids who survived in the forest for 40 days because they could forage for food in the forest. I can’t even forage for food in my own fridge. I know what a VLOOKUP is though. Can I VLOOKUP my way through the apocalypse?

These were some of my initial thoughts of seeing some of the footage of Hurricane Helene’s destruction. We are not prepared for the apocalypse nor do we know how to survive it! 

The climate catastrophe that we’ve all been told was going to happen if rich people didn’t stop warming up the planet so they can buy yachts is here. Hurricane Helene caused the death of over 200 people, power outages, and left many stranded. I think it’s time we start naming hurricanes after corporations or rich people so people know who caused the damage. No one named Helene deserves to be associated with a storm that uprooted so many lives. Unless Helene is a CEO, then they deserve it! 

Hurricane Helene happened because we’ve been miseducated by the people oppressing us about how to bring about change. Shockingly, the government didn’t give us a manual on revolting! (The Spook Who Sat by Door is a pretty good manual though.) As scientists have been ringing the alarm on global climate change, Joe Biden has been sleeping during climate conferences and oil companies have continued to poison our planet and fund genocides.

We’ve been told the best ways to change things is to vote, call our elected officials, and protest in a way that doesn’t inconvenience the ruling class. Essentially the ruling class has told us to ask them, the people who are causing global climate change to stop global climate change. The government has also said we have to ask the perpetrators nicely or else they will send the police to arrest us. We have to stop listening to our oppressors. 

If we had not asked nicely and used our collective power to stop participating in activities that are warming the planet, then the climate catastrophe would not be upon us. If we used our collective power to stop the machinations of the United States military instead of fighting with our co-workers over Slack, there wouldn’t be multiple genocides.

I’m not saying you were wrong for calling out Susan for finishing your soymilk. I’m just saying if we all agreed that we wanted to live in a better world, you wouldn’t have to worry about your co-workers finishing your soy milk because you wouldn’t have to go to an office that sucks your soul.

News that made me hotter than I already am (which is very hot)

I’m so hot I’m having trouble not screaming on slack WHY ARE WE WORKING? WE SHOULD BE OUT ON THE STREET!

The NYPD shot 4 people because they were chasing down a man who hopped the turnstile. Yes, we are paying money for the NYPD to play grand theft auto on the subway over $2.90. Honestly I don’t care if the man just robbed a bank (actually, I do care – I would have congratulated him) and hopped a turnstile to evade arrest. No amount of money is worth human safety. Someone should tell this to the goons that own Apple. Yes, maintaining a civil war so people can have phones that they use to avoid each other makes you a goon. Let’s face it, corporations are the mob with good branding.  

The NYPD claim the reason why they opened fire in a public space filled with predominantly Black people is because the person they were chasing had a knife. And as we all know the police deeply care about Black people. Displaying a knife has the exact same impact on public safety as firing bullets. The NYPD was just trying to protect the riders from seeing an item that they see in their daily lives. 

Who among us hasn’t been traumatised by almost cutting their fingers while chopping an onion while tears streamed down their eyes? Clearly, the NYPD was just trying to protect New Yorkers from additional trauma of seeing a knife by carrying out a mass shooting. A mass shooting is definitely okay when a cop does it. So it’s safer than seeing a knife. 

Except for the cops can’t find the knife which they claimed was a threat to public safety. The cops claim someone must have taken the knife. I’d like to admit that person was me! Yep I needed a new knife to chop my onions so I figured why not pick this one up in the middle of a mass shooting! Do they seriously think we’ll believe this nonsense? 

It doesn’t matter whether we believe it or not, the question they’ll always ask is Who gon’ check me, boo? Eric Adams aka Martin Luther King’s nightmare was already praising the cops for doing a great job of making Black people feel unsafe by saying the cops practised restraint. So pretty much, Eric Adams said you should be glad we didn’t hurt even more people. I’m sorry, what? Why am I paying money to get shot at in the subway? I don’t think being shot at while commuting to work is anyone’s kink. Sorry if I’m kink shaming. 

However, if this is your kink, have you considered being a rebel against the evil state?

Eric Adams won’t check these fools so we have to. That’s MLK’s dream.

News that made me say the CIA must have written this

@feelthenewswithmarcela Leave Flatbush alone!!! If you want to watch more of the videos subscribe to my newsletter or patreon in bio! #flatbush #gentrification #brooklyn #feelthenewS ♬ original sound – Feel the News

See ya later,

Marcela